T-Shirt
Travels takes us from our local charity bin to the remote fishing
villages in Southern Africa to introduce us to a people desperate to do
anything to make ends meet. Focusing on Zambia, this journey
investigates the second hand clothes business and seeks to understand
the growing inequalities that exist between the first and third worlds.

T-shirt
Travels explores how a continent rich with natural resources and human
potential has become the dumping ground for our old clothes and
discarded goods.

In
sharing the struggle of a population that finds itself growing poorer
and poorer, T-shirt Travels, uncovers the enduring spirit and resilience
of these people.

The
documentary reveals how this poverty is tied to obstacles imposed by
third world debt and the harsh economic conditions dictated by the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In Zambia, as we learn from
the people in the documentary, selling second hand clothes becomes one
way to earn enough money to survive. It allows Africans to explain the
challenges they face in a global economy.

The
journey begins in the streets of the United States, where clothes are
dropped off in the charity bins, and continues to an Indian importer Mr.
Patel in Zambia, who then sells them to individual businesspeople. We
meet Luka, who at 19 years old must support his family by selling and
trading clothes in remote part of western Zambia. Through his story we
see how our old clothes constitute a backbone of Zambia's growing
informal economy and provide a livelihood for many.

In
order to connect the lives of individuals with the larger economic
problems of trade, debt and development, and to put the argument in a
historical context, the documentary includes interviews with a number of
experts in the fields of banking, economics and aid. These include
amongst others; Dr, Kenneth Kaunda, former President of Zambia, Mr.
Madavo, Vice President Africa Region, World Bank, Professor Jeffery
Sachs, Harvard University and Dr. Richard Jolly, Senior Advisor at the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

T-shirt
Travels was made through the Sports Humanitarian Group, a
not-for-profit, with funding from ITVS, Soros Documentary Fund, The
Grubman Compton Foundation, The Waylen Foundation, The International
Foundation for Arts and Culture and many other generous individuals.

The 2002 SACOD Forum: Films (that) sing for me

Author: Mhando, MartinDate: 2002Place: Murdoch University, Australia

The
annual Sacod Forum taking place in the Southern African region is an
event created to “provide space for filmmakers to meet, view each
other’s work and exchange ideas and experiences”. This year’s Forum, the
Sixth, was held in Johannesburg, South Africa between 20th and 26th
October.

The
Forum is probably the only professional film-related event in the
region that approximates a film school type critical study occasion. Its
value ranges from affording opportunity to catch up with the more
recent film product coming from region, to a serious look at how cinema
language is developing from year to year in this erstwhile film-product
barren area of Africa.

The
60 or so participants come from the 12 countries of the Southern
African region. Cinema practitioners from the region facilitate it but
it also included Ebbe Preisler from Denmark who screened a few Danish
shorts just to spice up the critical taste buds of the participants.

Shake your brains / Kurakurisa Ouruvi

Author: Siyolwe, WabeiDate: 2001

KURAKURISA OURUVI / SHAKE YOUR BRAINS is a film about
alcohol abuse in the Kunene North Region, north-western
Namibia. Rina SHERMAN explored the universe of alcohol
abuse in this Region where she has, for the past three
years, been directing THE HIMBA YEARS, a
multi-disciplinary research
programme aimed at creating a living trace of Ovahimba cultural heritage.

Ovahimba, Ovadhimba, OvahereroS women, men and children,
some of who have never been filmed before, deliver
testimonies regarding the destructive
role of alcohol in their homes, families and communities. Their
frank and lucid words often border on the tragicS in a region
where pastoralists still live from livestock in relative
independence.

The film
SHAKE YOUR BRAINS / KURAKURISA OURUVI was produced on
request of members of the community of the Kunene north Region of
Namibia. It was made within the context of the community
development action of THE HIMBA YEARS project.The film is to
serve as an instruction tool in the educational programmes
run by government and NGO institutions in Namibia.

The film is available VHS PAL (other formats on demand)
in the original English and Otjiherero version with
English sub-titles. 200N$ or 200 FF, packaging and
shipping excluded.

Ghana's Concert Party Theatre

Author: Cole, CatherineDate:

Ghana's Concert Party Theatre
Catherine M. Cole

An engaging history of Ghana's enormously popular concert party theatre

Under
colonial rule, the first concert party practitioners
brought their comic variety shows to audiences throughout
what was then the British Gold Coast colony. As social and
political circumstances shifted through the colonial
period and early years of Ghanaian independence, concert party
actors demonstrated a remarkable responsiveness to changing social
roles and volatile political situations as they continued
to stage this extremely popular form of entertainment.
Drawing on her participation as an actress in concert
party performances, oral histories of performers, and
archival research, Catherine M. Cole traces the history
and development of Ghana's concert party tradition. She
shows how concert parties combined an eclectic array of
cultural influences, adapting characters and songs from
American movies, popular British ballads, and local story-telling
traditions into a spirited blend of comedy and social
commentary. Actors in blackface, inspired by Al Jolson,
and female impersonators dramatized the aspirations,
experiences, and frustrations of their audiences. Cole's
extensive and lively look into Ghana's concert party
provides a unique perspective on the complex experience of
British colonial domination, the postcolonial quest for
national identity, and the dynamic processes of cultural
appropriation and social change. This book will be
essential reading for scholars and students of African
performance, theatre, and popular culture.

Catherine M. Cole is Associate Professor in the Department of
Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She has published numerous articles on African theatre
and has collaborated with film maker Kwame Braun on
"passing girl; riverside," a video essay on the ethical
dilemmas of visual anthropology.

Now the video which goes with it is called
"Stage-shakers!" and is available from Indiana University
Press and it retails for $39 USD. Minus the photo, here
is what I found on there site: (which is
iupress@indiana.edu )

Stage-Shakers!
Ghana's Concert Party Theatre
Kwame Braun

A lively video documentary that brings Ghana's concert party theatre to life.

For the first time, Western audiences have access to the
power and intensity of Ghana's remarkable concert party
theatre through Kwame Braun's 90-minute documentary video.
Stage-Shakers! brings its festive atmosphere to life by
showing backstage preparation - touring, making-up, and
practicing - as well as live performance footage.
Interviews with key performers, both pioneers and current
practitioners, reveal the concert party as a dynamic form of
entertainment that is in step with popular fashion, music, song,
dance, and social issues. Researched and filmed in
collaboration with Catherine M. Cole, this video companion
is an important extension of her book, Ghana's Concert
Party Theatre.

Kwame Braun teaches filmmaking at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He has taught at the University of California, Los
Angeles; Columbia College, Chicago; and the School of
Visual Arts in New York. His work includes Hena Bedi
M'ade? (in Twi) and passing girl; riverside - An Essay on
Camera Work which was awarded the National Education Media
Network's Bronze Apple

First Universities Film/Video Festival/Conference

If you’ve got past the title you’re probably wanting to
find out, as a hard-working technician out there, what
people can possibly learn about film/TV production in a
university, technikon or high school that will be of any
use to them in earning a living in a competitive industry.
You may also ask yourself how they could have the cheek
to hold a festival for the products of such courses.
Wouldn’t the first of such a kind have been a boring and
incomprehensible look inside the heads of the rather young and
inexperienced?

In
fact, the films of the youngest producers at the
festival, from John Hill’s Young Filmmakers’ Workshop in
Cape Town, were the most ‘comprehensible’. They showed a
mastery of the storyline, continuity, an ability to make
every shot count (most of them were silent too). Camera work,
editing, exposure were all very good, within their simple style.
They showed, in fact, that the grammar of film is pretty
familiar to all of us. These producers would also have had
exposure to TV since before their teens, and will have
picked up the simplified techniques that TV rips off from
film, scales down and sells all over again with a fanfare.

The
standard of these productions must prove then, you may
argue, that anybody who looks carefully enough can make
movies; it is only experience in the industry that can
improve a person’s craftsmanship in a technique. I’m
supposing that most readers, like myself, learnt on the job. By
learning on the job, one also learns (not separate from technique,
but as an integral part of it) the ‘mythology’ of the
film/video industries; that everything happens at full speed,
from script to release print; that you must ‘give the
audience what they want’; and that shared knowledge of the
big secret about film ‘tricks’, that feeling that becomes
a smile when a layman asks, with round lips, ‘Is that how
you do it?’

Not
only ‘How did you do that?’ but ‘Why did you do that?’
were the questions that should have been asked at this
festival but weren’t. Quite often, during the two days of
screenings and unstructured discussion which followed each
one, I felt like saying ‘What did that one mean?’ Some of
the older students’ productions were, to put it mildly, ‘far
away’, and nothing like the clear stories that the school pupils
produced.

I’m
not detracting from John Hill’s contribution when I say
that this weird kind of production is what we should
expect from tertiary education courses. Students should,
in the hackneyed old phrase about universities, be free to
experiment, be free of production deadline and costs,
questions of equipment hire, insurance, the censorboard,
overtime, etc., and free of having always to bear in mind
how Mr and Mrs Average will watch what you make. How often
haven’t people in the industry said to themselves, ‘One day I’ll
make my own movie’ - usually meaning a production that is free
from the above pressures, free of technical and content
compromises, one that they are happy to see on the screen
with their names on the end. Most screenings, when two or
three technicians are present, are post-mortems,
stabs-in-the-back, regrets, and I
should-have-done-it-this-ways.

All
these regrets wouldn’t have been prevented by having been
to a film school. What’s the point anyway of having the
opportunity to script and make a very private and personal
film? Eventually a filmmaker has to come to grips with
the mass audience; but is it possible to escape the catch-22
of the mass audience?

The
Technikon justified its course by saying that its main
aim was to give graduates a head start on other newcomers
to the industry. And they are succeeding very well, to
judge from their productions seen at this festival. Some
of them would put to shame some scenes from SA features,
documentaries and certainly TV productions; although the heady
early days of SABC-TV, when we broadcast our mistakes (some buried
them, too, in the SABC archives) are quickly passing. I
was one of the worst offenders; apart from the famous SABC
three-month video course, I also learnt on the job.

The
other advantage of the Technikon course, they might have
said but didn’t, was that in an industry where costs are
going up quicker than the number of new productions
(forget about the temporary bulge for TV-2), a
multi-skilled technician is more likely to get a job on any given
production than a more narrow specialist. The Technikon takes
people through all stages and skills from scripting to
projection. And they teach video skills as well, to meet
the growing demands of the closed-circuit market.

But
the Technikon work, while in their story lines (all their
scripts seemed original), still stuck to the usual rules
of grammar of film; the-ready-to-wear set of continuity
techniques, the cutting-on-movement, the use of cutaways,
etc, all the shoddy conventions that we use to maintain
the cinematic illusion of reality. Most productions of theirs
stuck firmly to the realist tradition, and where they departed
from it, the subjects took off in fantasy; ghost stories, the
supernatural. All were set in some never-never land,
scarcely recognisable as South Africa.

Many
other productions at the festival shared these same
characteristics, and the discussions showed why this was
the case; the Technikon and some other teaching
departments all stressed the importance of being able to
tell a story through pictures.

The
production from the Rhodes Journalism department, and
from Wits University, showed two other approaches. The
Journalism production On Gunfire Hill worked
within the journalistic strictures of the narrower version
of realism known as subjectivity, and showed a desire to get to
grips with the South African situation. It was typical of, but
more successful than other Journalism department
productions, and examined the aims and practices of the
1820 Settlers’ Monument against the history of Border
conflicts. The size of the theme could not be confined to
the small screen and the journalistic conventions, and the
conclusions thus seemed forced. Faulty technique and
equipment, and a confused pictorial sense further obscured
things. An encouraging departure from the journalistic
style was Jeremy Thomas’ Other People, an expressionistic
treatment of alienation that lost its audience through using a
system of signs that were obscure and slightly
inconsistent.

The
Wits University productions, on the other hand, freed of
the limitations of both story line and realism (which is
the obligation to show only those events which can either
be reproduced for another subsequent observer, or for
which eyewitnesses can be found - the camera becomes the gatherer
of empirical data), explored themes and elements of reality in a
creative way. In doing so, however, the makers (all
first-year students), revealed a lack of experience in
handling images at the deeper and more symbolic levels of
meaning. They were thus unable to maintain the continuity
of their themes, and carry forward the train of images
they had chosen. Given the fact that this was, for most of
them, the first movie, this failure was not surprising. In
graduate Harriet Gavshon’s Women in Process, a totally new form was explored, which broke the arbitrary dividing line between fact and fiction.

Regardless
of how we think of our abilities as human beings to know
reality, we are being stupid if we pretend that the film
or video will accurately and always reveal or give us
insight into that reality, if only we stick to the rules
of realism. This stupidity is made much worse when
practiced in South Africa, where the more blatant and crucial
facts of our existence are very often ignored, obscured, skimmed
over or twisted unrecognisably by the establishment. And in
the film/TV world we are all pretty firmly within the
establishment. There’s no real distinction to be made, in
this regard, between the film and TV industries. Most
things are made for big corporations, big money (or dreams
of it), or big government. The catch-22 operates
everywhere, the same rules about budgeting and audience
apply, the same sort of conventions and techniques are
used.

So
any training - whether on the job or in an educational
institution - which doesn’t teach people to question and
experiment, from the bottom up, with the tools,
techniques, conventions and images with which they work,
isn’t going to improve our local product at all. And most of us
will agree that the local product needs a lot of improvement. If
we are living now, in Alvin Toffler’s words, in the wold’s
‘social laboratory’, then surely we could be producing
things which would take the eyebrows off the average jaded
western media consumer.

What
we do have here are films and TV that give us either an
official version of the past, present or future (and this
official version hasn’t worked since the Frontier Wars
were fought around here, when one of the British Governors
invented the first crude form of apartheid - the
settlers’ wonderful British heritage brought many modern
techniques and skills to this sunny land) or a good imitation of
what’s making money in Europe or America. Our big mistake is to
compete with or imitate the imported product or idea.

But
just about everything else has been getting bigger and
better in the industry; number of productions (mainly TV,
not features), salaries, number of TV sets, audience
leisure hours and disposable income to spend in them,
range and level of taste (hence video libraries and film
festivals), and education. Due partly to the government’s desire
to give every white the highest possible education (before the
darkies start competing for jobs) and the technical mania
that has seized the country, just about every university
and technikon has a TV studio, or film equipment. Few of
those are used to teach production skills, but rather for
making educational programs. But the few courses such as
were represented at this festival must be welcome to the
industry, even allowing for the slow acceptance of, and
even prejudice against them by the older professionals in the
industry, who in less prosperous times would have entered it
straight from school or some other job. Most lecturers at the
festival are aware of the need to improve their courses and
their students, but are aware that no matter how good they
become, how good their equipment, they will never be able
to duplicate the skills that experience over five or
fifteen years can give.

In
the old days, (whenever that was) production houses
trained people on the job - and bore the cost of it. The
increase in overhead costs must make these trained
students a profitable addition to the modern small, flexible
production house. The state has taken over the training function,
without demanding the special tax or levy; but in a
repressive state like ours, we should beware of its gifts.

Another
advantage of an industry-oriented training is that
students are usually taught the job organisation of the
industry; they know how to fit in, and what is expected of
them. They understand the usual working methods, the
conventional way of doing things. And in a fast-moving and
expensive production, that quality is the one that will
get them all jobs next time around.

There
was of course a conflict of teaching approaches at the
festival, between the job-oriented ones on one side, and
wider, more theoretical and experimental approaches on the
other. Some vigorous criticism was voiced, but most of
it, unfortunately, occurred at the level of
misunderstanding. Each group claimed to have the sole key to the
improvement of the industry. The Technikon group and others saw
this as an improvement in a greater range of technical
skills, and leading to this a better quality of director.
The other group - Wits U. and Rhodes’ Journalism Dept. -
said that a greater emphasis on international film theory
and history, broad social issues, and how the mass media
interpreted a country’s mass culture, was needed.

The
Technikon group was able to negate the university
criticisms by pointing to the obvious technical flaws in
their productions, and the way these productions had
‘lost’ their audiences. The universities, as I have
implied in my early remarks, criticised the Technikon group
for their narrow technical and functional approach.

This
kind of split is mirrored in the industry, between
production and technical personnel, and also between
various areas of technical operations. The split into
specialist areas is encouraged by the economics of the industry.
The various groups relate most easily, efficiently (and, for
management, profitably) when everyone operates according to
the shared set of assumptions about:

job areas - who does what and when;

usual production practices and techniques;

the meanings of certain film and TV conventions - fades, cuts, etc;

the deeper levels of meaning associated with certain images.

Management
wants to be able to hire an instant production line of
specialists; technicals who can deliver the smooth zoom,
the constant sound level, directors who can handle cameras
and actors smoothly and quickly, and editors who can cut
it all together in a way quite close to the script, or
change it around to fit marketing decisions. The problem is that
the speed of production doesn’t allow the people in each of
these areas to talk to one another about detailed
interpretation of the script, let alone the basic
conception of it. Too often, the deeper levels of meaning
associated with particular sound and picture images, and
the way they are joined together in the finished product,
are taken for granted. There is very little discussion in
production about what will ‘work’. There is far too little
time, and no incentive; everyone is paid to do their job
and no more. So everyone relies on a superficial agreement,
and the result is the old stereotyped way of looking at things.
Experiment is impossible. As in the car industry, with regard to
the number of makes and models, the number of productions
(feature) is declining, and they all look the same.
Everyone is looking for the big-selling formula, the
winning genre.

The
more creative and original the production, the more
likely it is that the specialization will have been
crossed, e.g. William Wyler/Gregg Toland, and perhaps Koos
Roets/Katinka Heyns. The opposite pole of this is the news
cameraman; here today and gone tomorrow, having made the usual
formula.

Management’s
concern is, ultimately, profit, and they cannot be relied
on to improve the product. If the standard of local work
is to improve, it is the concern of everyone to get
involved with one another’s technique, from script to
sound-mix, to overcome the petty divisions and
misunderstandings based on them. Only in this way will the
creative abilities that everyone has in addition to
technical skills be released. Hopefully, future such
conferences/festivals will be able to work this direction, helped,
perhaps by a greater attendance by the working members of the
industry. The details of how to share creative ideas and
abilities, without some people’s ideas being ripped off to
line other people’s pockets, need to be carefully worked
out.